Maybe I can get us started.
A lot of the work around capacity building in terms of these practices came from international development work. Without going very far, south of the border in the United States, there have been big foundations that have invested for almost 25 or 30 years in perfecting the art and science of capacity building.
When the intermediaries and the departments came together with Black community leaders, NABC—my organization—was able to bring some of those best practices to inform the design of this entire initiative. The Black intermediaries you see today are building from the best practices of many intermediaries who have done this work specifically around capacity-building grants. I'm talking about big foundations like the Ford, MacArthur, Kellogg and other foundations that come together in a network called Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Their site is geofunders.org.
My organization is part of that network. Those best practices that are informing our capacity building, our understanding of capacity building and the organizational cycle that organizations went through come from that practice.
Within Canada, there's also a lot of knowledge and a body of practice. I think one of the things we could do as the next phase of sustaining this is to come together. That's why I liked the congress that Groupe 3737 organized in Montreal that brought together more than 200 leaders to exchange lessons learned. At the core of systems change is collective learning.
I think we can come together and build minimum standards around governance, leadership, evaluation, data and so on. There are a lot of examples. United Way Canada and United Way Greater Toronto have built these community impact standards. Imagine Canada has this standard. There's a lot of stuff we can do.
The big question now is how we move forward as we look at the next few years. We're laying a good foundation now. We have funded so many grassroots projects—more than 750—through this initiative alone. To sustain them, we need to start looking at new designs and new organizational models—place-based and quadrant-based—in various parts of the country. Look along linguistic groups and various intersectionalities so that we can organize groups. Bring other funders to talk about how we sustain this.
Thank you.